It is not well understood to what a great extent the Israeli Left was radicalized by Israel's 'Peace for Galilee' invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This radicalization was very similar to the radicalization of the American Left over Vietnam.

''We are three blocks away; you will be home in a minute.''The taxi driver nudges me rudely into semi-consciousness. I tryto shake the fog from my head. I am still half asleep, staringthrough the window at the Christmas lights. As consciousnessslowly seeps through, something here is out of place. Why is therea giant Christmas tree on display in Budapest when it is monthsafter Christmas? I shake my head some more. No, it is notBudapest. I left Budapest six hours ago and have been flying allnight. I must have succumbed to exhaustion on the ride up toHaifa in the taxi from the airport.

In the back country south of Warsaw, therestood a small shtetl, a little Jewish village,named Chelm. Renowned across the Pale, thevillagers of Chelm were famous for their sharpwits, their inventive brains, and their capacityfor resolving difficult problems.

Most American Jews are orthodox. No, that's not a misprint, nor is it a sign that I've taken leave of my senses. In fact, the bulk of American Jewry is very orthodox. The problem is, they're very orthodox in their liberalism, not their Judaism -- and therein lies the answer to all the costly studies, surveys and polls commissioned by Jewish organizations in their never-ending quest to understand why Jews are assimilating themselves out of existence.

The most fundamental question for this new Post-Oslo era is this: How could Israel have allowed itself to pursue the ''peace process'' in the first place? The answers are very likely to raise serious doubts about the nature of secular Zionism itself and its alleged success in resolving the modernity dilemma of the Jews.

While there is of course more than one way to look at the last two centuries of Jewish life on the planet, one instructive way to summarize them might be as a two-hundred year search for an alternative to traditional Orthodoxy.

The good news is that the ratings for Phil Donahue's new MSNBC talk show are nearly invisible; the bad news is that MSNBC gave this raving anti-American, pro-Palestinian leftist a platform in the first place, reconfiguring its entire nighttime lineup around him and terminating the program hosted by the pro-Israel Alan Keyes in the process.